Brian Martin’s The Deceptive Activist begins a critical and timely commentary on the role and use of lying and deception in the realm of politics. According to Martin, lying and deception are as mutually constitutive of social interactions as technologies of truth-telling. Lying and truth-telling are two sides of the same coin of communication. Instead of depreciating lying and deception as things to avoid on Kantian moral grounds Martin makes the case that lying and deceit are quotidian and fundamental and natural to human communication.

Martin wants readers to strategically think about the role of lying and deception using context dependent analysis of how deception can be beneficial in certain circumstances. Martin “…aims in this book to highlight the tensions around activism, openness and honesty.”[1] The central argument of the book is that lying and deception are critical and routinely deployed tools that activists use to pursue social change. Instead of debating the moral status of deception in a zero-sum game he asks readers to think of role of deception by strategically analyzing the use of the means of lying and deceit vis à vis an end goal of effecting political change through non-violence and harm reduction.

A Proper Forum

In Brian Rappert’s review of Brain Martin’s The Deceptive Activist Rappert raises the critical question of the proper forum for having a discussion on a book about deception and the use of deception in society. Rappert’s call for a forum for this discussion cannot be overstated. The use of deception is a slippery slope as its use requires an evaluation of the means deployed and the ends desired. History is rife with examples of noble attempts to pursue noble ends using means that in the end become revealed as ethically compromised and corrupting of the whole project. Rappert’s review of The Deceptive Activist lays the ground for the emergence of a discussion. Certainly a book review cannot begin to address all of the careful, meticulous, and robust debate and discussion needed to begin to formulate an emergent discussion on lying and deception in more neutral and strategic ways, however, we can begin to use Martin’s work as an opportunity to acknowledge the pervasive role of deception even in the circles of activists who promote justice, peace, compassion, and empathy.

It would be beneficial to develop an edited volume on lying and deception in society. Science and Technology Studies offers us the ability to conceptualize lying and deception as social and political technologies deployed in the wielding of power. The nuance that Martin’s account brings is the readiness to discuss these technologies as useful tools in activist endeavors to pursue their ideals of change and justice. Martin gives readers frequent examples of how powerful actors use deception to control narratives of their activities in order to positively influence the perception of their image. For Martin the crucial work “…should be to work out when deception is necessary or valuable.”[2] He proposes a criteria of evaluation to evaluate when deception should be deployed based on “harm, fairness, participation, and prefiguration.”[3] His criteria is applicable to activist decisions of when to keep a secret, leak information, plan an action, communicate confidentially, infiltrate the opposition, deploying masks at a protest, or circulating disinformation about a political opponent.

However, in a world in which deception is normalized, his criteria runs the risk of ignoring how deceit, when mobilized by powerful actors, can threaten the less powerful. Developing a means to evaluate deploying deception should be organized by small groups of activists without a way to condemn the use of deceit by the powerful to harm the less powerful leaves the reader wanting more. Martin’s criteria were developed specifically to evaluate when deception might be justified by activist groups who have asymmetrical power relations to the wielders of state and corporate power. The tension that emerges from Martin’s book is between the use of deception by small groups in contrast to large and highly centralized powerful state authorities. Martin explains, “By being at the apex of a bureaucratic organization or prestige system, authorities have more power and a greater ability to prevent any adverse reactions due to deceptions that serve their interests.”[4]

Deception and Defactualization

Martin attempts to negotiate around this problem of recognizing deception as an important tool in activist struggles while also condemning history’s greatest abuses of deception by defining an assessment criteria to evaluate the context and nuance of when deception should be used in according to an ethic of minimal harm. Martin suggests “… assessments are dependent on the context. Still, there are considerable differences in the possible harms involved.” The way out of the ethical tensions that arise when those seeking to do good use the means of deception is to turn to assessing “situations according to the features of effective nonviolent action.”[5] I am not convinced that this enough to effectively deal with the dilemmas that arise when the power of deception is harnessed even in search of what are seemingly good and just ends. After all do we want to live in a world in which the ends justify the means, or the means become the ends in themselves? I can think of plenty examples in which this type of thinking bleeds.

Martin’s work calls us to reconsider the critiques of deception developed by Hannah Arendt in the Crisis of the Republic. Ardent writes, “In the realm of politics, where secrecy and deliberate deception have always played a significant role, self-deception is the danger par excellence; the self-deceived deceiver loses all contact with not only his audience, but also the real world, which still will catch up with him, because he can remove his mind from it but not his body.”[6] The dangerous step in the use of the means and power of deception in the pursuit of just ends lies in the corruption of those ends through defactualization.

Defactualization is a term used by Arendt in which the self-deceived loses the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction. The defactualization of the world, created by the self-deceiver, engulfs them because no longer can the self-deceiver see reality as it stands. The self-deceiver accommodates the facts to suit his or her assumptions: the process of defactualization. The actor becomes blind through his lies and can no longer distinguish truth and false. Martin does not leave a critique of self-deception by the way side, but his brief treatment of it at the end of his work forces us to find the space in which we can have a more robust and developed conversation per Rappert’s concern.

In the post-truth world, The Deceptive Activist is an immensely powerful work that helps to propel us to critically and strategically examine deception, in our own practices, in the era of the grand master of deception: Trump. Daily we are bombarded by various deceptions through the President’s Twitter. Exposing the number of Trump’s lies from inauguration crowd size to healthcare to climate change to taxes is a tiresome and arduous task. When one lie is exposed another is already communicated. The extensive amount of lies leveraged on a daily basis deflates the power of activists to expose and reveal the lies.

In the post-truth era the spectacle of exposing lies and deceptions has become so routine it loses meaning and becomes part of the static of public discourse on contemporary events. There is no more shock value in the exposure of lies. Lying is normalized to the point of meaninglessness. While Martin’s work demonstrates crucial analysis into the how lying and deception are fundamental to everyday interactions, the acceptance of this reality should be constantly questioned and critically analyzed. The Deceptive Activist carefully paints a spectrum of how lying is used in everyday human relationships to reflect on the need for activists to practice critical self-analysis of the methods of deception they often deploy in their agendas to pursue change in society. Martin concludes by discussing what so concerned Hannah Arendt over 50 years ago: self-deception. This even more dangerous form of deception should be questioned. In the Trumpian age we must find the space to have discussions on deception, lying, and defactualization while resisting the temptation to self-deceive.

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The Fundamental Question of Social Epistemology

How should the pursuit of knowledge be organized, given that under normal circumstances knowledge is pursued by many human beings, each working on a more or less well-defined body of knowledge and each equipped with roughly the same imperfect cognitive capacities, albeit with varying degree of access to one another’s activities?